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'Radio Free Dixie'

"The blues coming from "Miss Sis' Polk's juke joint captured Williams's imagination at an early age.  On hot summer nights, "barrel-house music engulfed the neighborhood like a dense fog," he recalled.  As a young teenager, Robert Williams used to steal from bed, pretend to be headed for the outhouse, and then keep going.  He "could hear the piano, hot and spicy, rolling out the blues."  The 1920s and 1930s were the heyday of the Piedmont blues, at once party music and deep lament, hammered out on piano, guitar, harmonica, banjo, and washboard, slow dragging and high stepping in juke joints that nuzzled the railroad tracks from Atlanta to Durham.  "The drawn home blues" pouring out of Miss Sis's Place "drew me like a magnet," he wrote in his unpublished autobiography more than fifty years later." (Pg. 23)

Tyson, Timothy B. Radio Free Dixie, Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.